The Ticket’s Mike Rhyner recalls that spooky letter from would-be assassin John Hinckley

Recently, I was surprised to learn that some people don’t know that would-be Ronald Reagan assassin John Hinckley grew up in Dallas and lived with his parents on one of the toniest stretches of Beverly Drive. He graduated from Highland Park High School.

Radio veteran Mike Rhyner will never forget. Co-host of The Hardline on The Ticket, Rhyner got a memorable letter from Hinckley the year after he wounded President Reagan and three others in an infamous 1981 shooting designed to impress actress Jodie Foster.

In 1982, Rhyner was a morning show producer at KZEW-FM, the rock station known as The Zoo.

“I was just spit-balling one day and I knew that he used to live here,” says Rhyner. “I was reading a story about him somewhere and it said that he was now at St. Elizabeth’s [Hospital], so I said, ‘Let’s write him and see if he answers.’”

Not only did he answer, it turns out he was a fan.

A reply letter came in “about a week,” according to Rhyner.

“Dear Morning Zoo People, Yes, I remember KZEW,” he wrote. “It used to be the station I listened to when I was living on McKinney in Big D.”

Rhyner had asked some questions that, he says, “were harmless.”

Hinckley’s answers alternated between goofy and chilling.

What music did he like? Where did he hang out in Dallas?

“I used to listen to the song ‘Heroes’ by David Bowie when I was stalking Carter and Reagan,” Hinckley wrote. “It put me in a strange mood. In March and April of 1980, I hung out at Peaches Record Store on Fitzhugh.”

“There’s a certain element of creepiness in it for sure,” Rhyner says. “But you could tell by the tone of the letter that he was not off put at all. He seemed to be telling me what I wanted to know.”

One Dallasite whose life was rattled by the shooting was pawnbroker Isaac “Rocky” Goldstein. He had no recollection of Hinckley when the feds called him minutes after the shooting to inform him that the gun had been purchased at his Rocky’s Pawn Shop at 2018 Elm.

Moments after the call, ATF, FBI and Secret Service agents descended on his store. Goldstein didn’t mind the feds.

“The media drove me crazy,” he said in a 1981 interview with The News. “The press started coming in with two and three cameras apiece.” Goldstein died in 1995.

“I didn’t mean to make Rocky’s Pawn Shop so notorious,” Hinckley said in his KZEW letter. “I could have bought the gun anywhere.”

And in closing, “Dallas is still my favorite city and I plan to live there when I get out of this hospital.”

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